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Mais ça alors
. Why were copies made to lose them with the originals? I said madame had packed
them by mistake. It was a great mistake, she said. A fatal mistake. But monsieur can remember them
surely. No, I said. But, she said, monsieur will have to remember them.
Il faut le souvienne rappeler.
Oui
, I said,
mais ce n’est pas possible. Je ne m’en souviens plus. Mais il faut faire un effort
, she
said.
Je le ferais
, I said. But it’s useless.
Mais qu’est-ce que monsieur va faire
? she asked.
Monsieur has worked here for three years. I have seen monsieur work at the café on the corner. I’ve
seen monsieur at work at the table in the dining room when I’ve brought things up.
Je sais que
monsieur travaille comme un sourd. Qu’es-ce que il faut faire maintenant? Il faut recommencer
, I
said. Then the concierge started to cry. I put my arm around her and she smelled of armpit sweat and
dust and old black clothes and her hair smelled rancid and she cried with her head on my chest. Were
there poems too? she asked. Yes, I said. What unhappiness, she said. But you can recall those surely.
Je tâcherai de la faire
, I said. Do it, she said. Do it tonight.
“I will, I told her. Oh monsieur, she said, madame is beautiful and amiable and
tous le qui’il y a
de gentil
but what a grave error it was. Will you drink a glass of marc with me? Of course, I told her,
and, sniffing, she left my chest to find the bottle and the two small glasses. To the new works, she
said. To them, I said. Monsieur will be a member of the Académie Française. No, I said. The
Académie Americaine, she said. Would you prefer rum? I have some rum. No, I said. Marc is very
good. Good, she said. Another glass. Now, she said, go out and get yourself drunk and, since
Marcelle is not coming to do the flat, as soon as my husband comes in to hold down this dirty loge I
will go upstairs and clean the place up for you to sleep tonight. Do you want me to buy anything for
you? Do you want me to make breakfast? I asked her. Certainly, she said. Give me ten francs and I’ll
bring you the change. I’d make you dinner but you ought to eat out tonight. Even though it is more
expensive.
Allez voir des amis et manger quelque part
. If it wasn’t for my husband I’d come with
you.
“Come on and have a drink at the Café des Amateurs now, I said. We’ll have a hot grog. No I
can’t leave this cage until my husband comes, she said.
Débine-toi maintenant
. Leave me the key. It
will all be in order when you get back.
“She was a fine woman and I felt better already because I knew there was only one thing to do;
to start over. But I did not know if I could do it. Some of the stories had been about boxing, and some
about baseball and others about horse racing. They were the things I had known best and had been
closest to and several were about the first war. Writing them I had felt all the emotion I had to feel
about those things and I had put it all in and all the knowledge of them that I could express and I had
rewritten and rewritten until it was all in them and all gone out of me Because I had worked on
newspapers since I was very young I could never remember anything once I had written it down; as
each day you wiped your memory clear with writing as you might wipe a blackboard clear with a
sponge or a wet rag; and I still had that evil habit and now it had caught up with me.
“But the concierge, and the smell of the concierge, and her practicality and determination hit my
despair as a nail might hit it if it were driven in cleanly and soundly and I thought I must do something
about this; something practical; something that will be good for me even if it cannot help about the
stories. Already I was half glad the novel was gone because I could see already, as you begin to see
clearly over the water when a rainstorm lifts on the ocean as the wind carries it out to sea, that I could
write a better novel. But I missed the stories as though they were a combination of my house, and my
job, my only gun, my small savings and my wife; also my poems. But the despair was going and there
was only missing now as after a great loss. Missing is very bad too.”
“I know about missing,” the girl said.
“Poor daughter,” he said. “Missing is bad. But it doesn’t kill you. But despair would kill you in
just a little time.”
“Really kill you?”
“I think so,” he said.
“Can we have another?” she asked. “Will you tell me the rest? This is the sort of thing I always
wondered about.”
“We can have another,” Roger said. “And I’ll tell you the rest if it doesn’t bore you.”
“Roger, you mustn’t say that about boring me.”
“I bore the hell out of myself sometimes,” he said. “So it seemed normal I might bore you.”
“Please make the drink and then tell me what happened.”
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